people-from-switzerland

"We have to fight against the fragmentation of society – about divisions, which are so painful in its consequences for civilian populations, for the most vulnerable, for the migrants, those displaced by war and violence, those affected by the weaponization of societies."

"In the training of a number of us graduate students at Berkeley in the mid-'30's, the late estimable Professor K. F. Meyer told us of the concealment by the city fathers of San Francisco of an outbreak of human bubonic ("black") plague, concealment being in response to pressure of the city's business community which saw publication of plague's presence as a threat to business. It would scare away tourists and business travelers. Professor Meyer pointed out that groups with conflicts of interest, particularly groups which have a record of strongly materialistic behavior, do not characteristically think in the public interest in public health matters."

"The thing is that everything comes at once, and when it goes quiet it really gets quiet."

"I like serious subjects but treated in a light form."

"We will get to tell our stories, because the world is ready for us all."

"I have also been moving around a lot and it is kind of hard to keep track of where I am."

"I would like to encourage my fellow Rwandan female filmmakers to pursue their dreams and ambitions."

"I remember thinking: “that’s what I want to do.”"

"What is it that you leave behind when you leave home? And is it possible to recreate it?"

"I hope we can get together to make this cinema accessible."

"It is a difficult path, but it is possible and I am glad to be walking on it."

"Your work can never be at the same level."

"I make sure I do what needs to be done."

"We wouldn't want to be like the Swiss, would we? That would be awful! We'd be rich!"

"The Swiss are offended at being called gentlemen, and have to establish the proof of their low origin, in order to qualify them for stations of importance."

"Centuries later knights on horseback were to learn a similar lesson in fighting from the massed infantry of Swiss soldiers who, like the Greek hoplites before them, fought with and for each other as equals. We now think of the Swiss Guards who stand on duty at the Vatican in their multicoloured Renaissance uniforms as a charming detail and Switzerland as peaceful and bucolic, home to good chocolate, discreet banks and, as the character Harry Lime in The Third Man unkindly says, the cuckoo clock. For 200 years, until a square was finally broken in 1515, the Swiss formations, bristling with pikes and sheltering archers with their deadly crossbows, were the terror of Europe and the key to victory, at least for anyone who could afford to hire them. ‘Pas d’argent, pas de Suisse,’ as the saying went."

"There is no more beautiful scenery or climate for summer travel than Switzerland presents. The people are industrious and honest, simple and frugal in their habits, and would be very poor with all this, if it were not from the travel through their country. I wish their suprlus population would emigrate to the United States."

"True believing Christians are sheep among wolves. ... They employ neither worldly sword nor war, since with them killing is absolutely renounced."

"The vulgarity of the myth of modernity is plainly revealed by the preeminence in its mythology of the factors of quantity; to be modern is always to beat the record in some respect. Distinction, therefore, is opposed to modernity as quality is to quantity."

"To have lived a full life is to have learned to love, that is, to give greatly. It is to have learned how to make the gesture that some scholars have called oblative, opposing this term to captative; as though contrasting the gesture of offering with the gesture of seizing."

"The first of men did no more than take the fruit of the tree, and that, we are told, was sin. Modern humanity "tortures the tree in order the sooner to obtain its fruit.""

"The last two centuries were familiar with the myth of progress. Our own century has adopted the myth of modernity. The one myth has replaced the other. ... Men ceased to believe in progress; but only to pin their faith to more tangible realities, whose sole original significance had been that they were the instruments of progress. ...This exaltation of the present ... is a corollary of that very faith in progress which people claim to have discarded. The present is superior to the past, by definition, only in a mythology of progress. Thus one reatins the corollary while rejecting the principle. There is only one way of retaining a position of whose instability one is conscious. One must simply refrain from thinking—and surrender oneself to the vortex of the corollary."

"Daniel Auteuil - Ugolin"

"There's no gold here. It's Jurassic cretaceous from the second Quaternary era."

"I won't help those who stole my father's water! … The truth is the spring was always there! The truth is you blocked it off!"

"Aren't you Manon, the daughter of Monsieur Jean? I see you don't remember me. That's because I've changed a lot. I'm Ugolin — your poor father's friend. You've changed too. You're a real young lady. I hardly recognize you."

"I love you, Manon. I love you with all my heart! Manon! I want to marry you! I'm all alone! I've got no-one! My grandparents are dead. My father hanged himself when I was little. My mother died of the flu. There's only Uncle Papet! He's rich, he's old. He's going to die. He's going to leave me all his money. It'll be yours, because I love you. I love you! I am sick for the love of you. It's suffocating me! I saw you bathing in the rainwater. I watched for hours. You were so lovely. I was tempted to commit a crime!"

"What a terrible mixture between my remorse and the happiness I'd like to bring you. Don't you know how I'll slave for you, my love?"

"Papet, I'm leaving because I can't go on. It's not the carnations. It's because of my love. I realize she'll never want me. I suspected it because her ribbon burned my flesh. And when I told her in public I wanted to marry her she spat at me in a fury. What's more, she fled towards the teacher. When he talks to her, she lowers her eyes. When he stops, she lingers until he continues. And he takes her love for granted. He's unaware of his happiness, but I know my misery. I can't stand it. I'd like to kill him. But it would hurt her, and I'd never hurt her. I leave her my farm and all that's hidden — you know where — to the left of the fireplace. Don't make any trouble. It's not her fault or yours. It's fate. Arrange a Mass for me, because up there, I'll have to explain about the spring. Adieu, my Papet. I'm sorry to leave you, but I can't stay."

"Dear little Manon, The notary will tell you that I'm leaving you my whole estate. It may surprise you, but it's the truth. The lawyer will give you all the documents because your father was my son. He was the Soubeyran I'd hoped for all my life, whom I tormented to death because I didn't know who he was. If I had told him about the spring, he'd still be playing his harmonica, and you'd all be living in our family home. No one knows it, but I'm too ashamed to face anyone, even the trees. In the village, there's a person who knows. She will tell you everything. It's Delphine, the old blind woman. She'll explain that it's all because of Africa. I don't deserve to kiss you, and I never dared speak to you, but maybe now you can forgive me and even say a little prayer for poor Ugolin and me. I'm so pathetic, I even pity myself. Out of sheer spite, I never went near him. I never knew his voice or his face. I never saw his eyes, which might have been like his mother's. I only saw his hump and the pain I caused him. Now you understand why I want to die, because next to my torments, even hell would be a pleasure. Besides, I'll see him up there. I'm not afraid of him. Now he knows he's a Soubeyran. He's no longer a hunchback because of me. He knows it was all a foolish mistake. I'm sure that instead of blaming me, he'll defend me. Farewell, my darling girl. Your grandfather, César Soubeyran"

"Emmanuelle Béart - Manon"

"Yves Montand - César Soubeyran, "Le Papet""

"Hippolyte Girardot - Bernard Olivier"

"Margarita Lozano - Baptistine"

"Yvonne Gamy - Delphine"

"Gabriel Bacquier and Eve Brenner - Singers at the wedding"

"Revenge, love, and the shocking irony of a hidden family relationship highlight this sequel to the acclaimed Jean de Florette. Although Manon des Sources can stand alone as a separate motion picture, viewers will gain a deeper understanding of it if they view Florette first. Both films, masterpieces of modern French cinema, owe their plots to Marcel Pagnol's novel L'Eau des Collines."

"There is something to be said for a long story that unfolds with an inexorable justice. In recent movies we've become accustomed to stories that explode into dozens of tiny dim-witted pieces of action, all unrelated to each other. Cars hurtle through the air, victims are peppered with gunshot holes, heroes spit out clever one-liners, and at the end of it all, what are we left with? Our hands close on empty air. Manon of the Spring, which is the conclusion of the story that began with Jean de Florette, is the opposite kind of movie. It moves with a majestic pacing over the affairs of four generations, demonstrating that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children. Although Manon is self-contained and can be understood without having seen Jean de Florette, the full impact of this work depends on seeing the whole story, right from the beginning; only then does the ending have its full force."

"Montand's plot against the hunchback was incredibly cruel, but the movie was at pains to explain that Montand was not gratuitously evil. His most important values centered on the continuity of land and family, and in his mind his plot against Depardieu was justified by the need to defend the land against an "outsider." As Manon of the Spring opens, some years later, the unmarried and childless Montand is encouraging his nephew to find a woman and marry, so that the family name can be continued. The nephew already has a bride in mind: the beautiful Manon (Emmanuelle Beart), daughter of the dead man, who tends goats on the mountainside and lives in poverty, although she has received a good education."

"The more you speak of yourself, the more you are likely to lie; say but little, 'twill scarcely gain belief; so strong are partiality and envy."

"Die wahre heutige Faulheit besteht in einer toten Bewegung."

"I noticed in the front row a small, very pale, almost white man, old, tremendously alert, old in the only way I love old age, namely more alive for all the years, more attentive, more unrelenting, expectant and ready, as though he still had to make up his mind about most things and must not disregard anything."

"Klassenbewusstsein, ja, die Theorie ist nur allzu richtig. Aber es gibt noch eine dritte Klasse, die des Sokrates, die der Unversöhnlichen."

"Arbeit ist Bewegung, aber das unsrige. Wir haben die verhängnisvolle Fähigkeit, andere nachahmen zu können, z. B. ein Mühlrad."

"I find it hard to swallow that I have only ten times more genes than those lowly bacteria in my gut. I had always liked the fact that they have ten thousand times less DNA than I did — that felt about right — but a factor of ten was carrying democracy a bit too far."

"Hold somebody's hand and feel its warmth. Gram per gram, it converts 10 000 times more energy per second that the sun. You find this hard to believe? Here are the numbers: an average human weighs 70 kilograms and consumes about 12 600 kilojoules / day; that makes about 2 millijoules / gram.second, or 2 milliwatts / gram. For the sun it's a miserable 0.2 microjoules / gram.second. Some bacteria, such as the soil bacterium "Azotobacter" convert as much as 10 joules / gram.second, outperforming the sun by a factor 50 million. I am warm because inside each of my body cells there are dozens, hundreds or even thousands of mitochondria that burn the food I eat."

"I am tired of hearing that the DNA in my cells nucleus is the complete blueprint of what is, or could be, me. There is more to me than that. The sequence of my nuclear DNA is not "My Genome.""

"The more a believer wishes to live the absolute call of God, the more essential it is to do so in the heart of human distress."

"Reliable and transparent programs are usually not in the interest of the designer."

"As a matter of fact, the adaptability of a program to changes in its objectives (often called maintainability) and to changes in its environment (nowadays called portability) can be measured primarily in terms of the degree to which it is neatly structured."